My fouth year Creative Writing instructor informed us on the first day that by the end of the year we should be producing material that was written at a professional level, ready to be published.
(Strange, considering this was a man who had never published anything, and the one time that the topic of real-world publishing advice was even broached, he went into a twenty minute rage about how his own academic purity and the sanctity of art would not be violated by anything as crass as reality. I'm so glad to be out of school, but I'm less glad that I used the word 'broached' in the previous sentence, 'cause I'm not sure I used it correctly, given that it's the thing you pin on your date's dress for the prom, right, so how can it be a verb, too?)
And yes, there actually are degrees in Creative Writing. I swear. Most people look at it on a c.v. and get a kind of puzzled expression, as if I majored in Paper Airplane Design or something. (That's so patently ridiculous;I only minored in Paper Airplane Design, alright? And I still can't make one of the damn things...)
This was all back in 1997. I was not on-line. I didn't know what that term even meant. To be a writer was a worthy, back-breaking calling; it took years and years of precise honing, discipline and dedication. After killing yourself day after day for decades on end, you might be able to get something published by the time you were, say, forty.
Cut to now:
How difficult is it to publish this post?
Um, not so difficult. I write; I push a button; voila.
In essence, the entire notion of 'writing' and 'publishing' has been turned upside down, shaken upside the head the way I used to shake my little cousin as a newborn. (That's a joke. I swear.)
Recently, Stephen King was given a lifetime achievement award by the group that hands out the National Book Awards. His speech centred upon the divisions between 'popular' fiction and 'literature' -- and how those chasms are largely elitist, self-imposed and arbitrary, since the overflow between the two realms is now constant and abundant.
There's another, even greater gap that is being filled, and it has to do with writing itself, the notion of writing, the point of writing.
You have kids ten, eleven years old that have blogs far more sophisticated (and probably more entertaining) than mine. They have their own code, some kind of linguistic shorthand that is impenetrable to my twenty-nine year old eyes but perfectly clear, I'm sure, to those under fifteen.
At first I thought e-mail was somewhat troubling, because notions of grammar and spelling were no longer, um, necessary. Now we have websites and blogs written by everyone and anyone in the world, available for all to see at a moment's notice, and words and concepts can be spelled and expressed any way at all.
Is this good or bad?
I dunno.
I still think it's mindblowing that you can write something, push a button, and have it (potentially) read by millions within a second or two.
You have kids in orphanges in Cambodia (www.futurelight.net) who are able to shoot the breeze with the CEOs of major corporations -- theoretically, true, but everything begins theoretically, right?
If you want to write a novel, you can now have it published with the push of a button. (True, this doesn't mean you'll make any money off of it, no, but it can be out there, in the world, ready and waiting for all to see.)
If you want to write a manifesto proclaiming that the later Police Academy films, the ones without Steve Guttenberg in the lead (Assignment Miami Beach, City Under Siege and Mission to Moscow) as the height of cinematic artistry, surpassing The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby and Hotel Rwanda and even, believe it or not, Cannonball Run II, then bang, it's out there in the cybersphere, ready for argument.
(I would disagree, because Guttenberg added so much more than he is ever given credit for to the series, especially the third and fourth ones, Back in Training and Citizens on Patrol, where the quality started to drop but were saved, if not redeemed, by Guttenberg's mere presence. Ditto with Burt Reynolds in The Cannonball Run sequel. )
The future Faulkner or Barker or Grisham or Atwood or Mailer or Mishima doesn't have to wait; they can post their stuff now, get feedback, make adjustments. I'm not saying that this is how the publishing world should work now, or how it will work in the future, but the point is, there are so many permutations that pop up even when you think about this issue for a moment or two. What's going to happen in five years, ten years? How can we hold authors in esteem when everyone's an author, if only online?
It's a wildly democratizing process, to be sure. No more snootiness. No more condescension or insecurity because one's own, deeply personal ramblings were rejected by the misunderstanding publishing elite.
No more excuses, either.
At its best, what this process means is that you can hard-wire your thoughts to another's within the space of moments. You can see something on the street or in the sky that makes you pause, or reminds you of something you once believed in, but have now rejected, and you can then transform these erractic musings into poetry, instantly, and let it fly.
Your vision of poetry, untouched by others hands and invisible editorial adjustments.
It's a brave new world we're in, shifting second-by-second, and the true authors of our lives are now ourselves.
Which, paradoxically enough, is how it's always been.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
WHAT DID YOU KNOW AND WHEN DID YOU KNOW IT? (Or, The place where lost things congregate...)
If you don't have time to read actual books, you can always check out the 'Books' section at www.newyorktimes.com and pretend that you do. (It works for me.) The other day there were reviews of two new books, one about Shakespeare and his times called Will in the World, and another about the recent prisoner abuse scandals perpetrated by the Americans and Brits over in Iraq. One book is about the modern-day military and what it does and does not do, what it should and shouldn't do, while the other is set in Victorian England and concerns itself with a playwright's life and its impact on his work. (Or is Shakespeare pre-Victorian. I should probably know that, right? I saw Shakespeare and Love and everything, but I still get all these eras-named-after-queens mixed up. And who decided that they were going to name an entire time period after prominent and successful women, anyways? Nothing wrong with that, but if it were to happen today I guess we'd all be living in the Oprah era. I guess that's better than the Sally Jess Raphael era...)
Not much correlation between these two books, true, but I will find illogical connections even if none exist, damnit, because that's what I'm built to do.
Dealing with historical and literary works like Shakespeare is a guessing game, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signify --
Wait.
I'm getting carried away.
When people write about Shakespeare, there's so much that's speculation, right? His intentions, his jobs, his influences, and even if Shakespeare's plays were, in fact, written by the historical-person-known-as-Shakespeare. (Kind of like 'The Artist Formerly Known as Elmo'.) When you start going back four, five hundred years, you're in the 'pre-Welcome Back Kotter era', as I like to call it, and primary sources are rare, if not non-existent. (Is 'not non-existent' a double negative? Oh, and this reminds me of a great anecdote about this famous teacher that died a month or so ago, a real philosophical dude, I forget his name, but he was always a wise-ass with his teachers. One day in college his philosophy teacher stated that it was lexically impossible to create a negative statement from two positive ones. To which the smartass in the front row rolled his eyes and said: "Yeah, yeah."
Get it? I think that's pretty funny, personally.
Anyway...
On the other hand, you can't more contemporary than the here and the now, and the military's actions in Iraq, and the abuse scandals that really shouldn't be all that scandalous. I'm not condoning these things by any means; I'm glad that that dude last week got sent to prison, but it's a freakin' obscenity that Bush didn't penalize anyone involved at the higher level -- Rumsfeld keeps his job, Gonzalez, who authorized the tricky memos basically validating the torture, gets promoted. Sweeeeet.
But it seems a little schizophrenic to me, this view of warfare and what constitutes shameful, despicable acts. War itself is a good thing, in this particular case; torturing the prisoners is not. Okay. Got it. So if you kill as many Iraqi soldiers as possible, you get the accolades of your peers and your country; if you shove them in a cell and beat 'em around a little bit, you get ten years in the military clink. Aren't both of these acts, like, the kind of things that you don't necessarily want to talk about over your morning juice? Aren't both of these things the kind of things that give you the cold sweats well into the morning hours? Maybe this should be the definition of a fundamentally wrong act: If you have nightmares about it, and it keeps you up at night, and you wake from your dreams screaming, then that act which precipitated these symptoms is not worthy of a medal, or promotion. Period.
But I digress...
My point is (or was) that we still really don't know the full extent of what went down. That old line from the Nixon years haunts us: "What did you know, and when did you know it?"
The eternal question of this time, and all time.
What did Shakespeare know? At what point in time? What did Bush know? When?
We can pinpoint events, dates, people and places. We can create the scenarios. The great works of art, the great wars, are impervious to inspection. They emerge, exist, are. We do our best to sort all of this stuff, but when you involve organisms as fundamentally fragile as humans, well, things get lost. There are always those shadowy corners where the lost things congregate, where light doesn't penetrate, and those are the places where history is made and our lives are shaped, for better or for worse.
Not much correlation between these two books, true, but I will find illogical connections even if none exist, damnit, because that's what I'm built to do.
Dealing with historical and literary works like Shakespeare is a guessing game, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signify --
Wait.
I'm getting carried away.
When people write about Shakespeare, there's so much that's speculation, right? His intentions, his jobs, his influences, and even if Shakespeare's plays were, in fact, written by the historical-person-known-as-Shakespeare. (Kind of like 'The Artist Formerly Known as Elmo'.) When you start going back four, five hundred years, you're in the 'pre-Welcome Back Kotter era', as I like to call it, and primary sources are rare, if not non-existent. (Is 'not non-existent' a double negative? Oh, and this reminds me of a great anecdote about this famous teacher that died a month or so ago, a real philosophical dude, I forget his name, but he was always a wise-ass with his teachers. One day in college his philosophy teacher stated that it was lexically impossible to create a negative statement from two positive ones. To which the smartass in the front row rolled his eyes and said: "Yeah, yeah."
Get it? I think that's pretty funny, personally.
Anyway...
On the other hand, you can't more contemporary than the here and the now, and the military's actions in Iraq, and the abuse scandals that really shouldn't be all that scandalous. I'm not condoning these things by any means; I'm glad that that dude last week got sent to prison, but it's a freakin' obscenity that Bush didn't penalize anyone involved at the higher level -- Rumsfeld keeps his job, Gonzalez, who authorized the tricky memos basically validating the torture, gets promoted. Sweeeeet.
But it seems a little schizophrenic to me, this view of warfare and what constitutes shameful, despicable acts. War itself is a good thing, in this particular case; torturing the prisoners is not. Okay. Got it. So if you kill as many Iraqi soldiers as possible, you get the accolades of your peers and your country; if you shove them in a cell and beat 'em around a little bit, you get ten years in the military clink. Aren't both of these acts, like, the kind of things that you don't necessarily want to talk about over your morning juice? Aren't both of these things the kind of things that give you the cold sweats well into the morning hours? Maybe this should be the definition of a fundamentally wrong act: If you have nightmares about it, and it keeps you up at night, and you wake from your dreams screaming, then that act which precipitated these symptoms is not worthy of a medal, or promotion. Period.
But I digress...
My point is (or was) that we still really don't know the full extent of what went down. That old line from the Nixon years haunts us: "What did you know, and when did you know it?"
The eternal question of this time, and all time.
What did Shakespeare know? At what point in time? What did Bush know? When?
We can pinpoint events, dates, people and places. We can create the scenarios. The great works of art, the great wars, are impervious to inspection. They emerge, exist, are. We do our best to sort all of this stuff, but when you involve organisms as fundamentally fragile as humans, well, things get lost. There are always those shadowy corners where the lost things congregate, where light doesn't penetrate, and those are the places where history is made and our lives are shaped, for better or for worse.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Heeeeere's Johnny: AN INVITATION TO ADULTHOOD
The first time that Michael Jordan unretired and came back to play basketball, he said that the reaction of the crowd during his initial game back was unlike anything he had ever heard before. It was the sound of people cheering for someone that they never thought they would see again. It was as if they were clapping and screaming for a dead man come back to life.
About ten years ago, Johnny Carson did a brief appearance on David Letterman's Late Show, and the effect was about the same. I know because I found a tape of that show when I was back home a little while ago, taped ten years ago when Dave did a week of shows in Los Angeles. I can't remember who the guests were, but every night for a week Dave would say 'Presenting tonight's Top Ten List, Mr.Magic Johnson!', and out would walk that pudgy wunderkind Larry 'Bud' Melman. The gag was still funny the third or fourth time; Dave would announce a famous name, and instead the audience would get Melman. The final night, Dave announced that Johnny Carson would be reading the list, and this time, lo and behold, Carson walked out. (This was two or three years after his run on The Tonight Show had ended.)
The applause was miraculous. It went on and on and on. At one point Carson sat behind the desk, looked as if he was about to say something, then smiled and shook his head and shook Letterman's hand and exited stage left as the audience screamed.
For me, Carson represented grown-up land. If you were old enough to actually be able to watch The Tonight Show on a regular basis, then you were an adult. You had all the rights that that implied. (Which, to a seven year old, basically meant, um, unlimited supplies of cookies and ginger ale and Johnny Carson before bed.) On those rare occasions and Friday nights when I did catch Carson, the jokes always went over my head, but I remember that he was always polite, and the audience always laughed. (It's hard to believe, but back then you never actually saw the audience. Remember that? Carson stood in front of the curtain, and he told his jokes, and you heard laughter, yes, but it seemed to emanate from some other, nearby realm. It kind of freaked me out a bit, actually, but I knew that they were there, those adults, and that was what mattered; I knew that somebody I'd be there, too. I knew that someday, maybe not soon, no, but someday, I'd be able to catch those jokes, and be part of that unseen fan club.)
And I did. By the time I was a teenager, Carson was still on the air, withstanding the assault of Arsenio. There was an old-fashionedness about Johnny that was slowly disappearing in the culture at that point in time. There was a class and a dignity to his humor, somehow. It invited you in on the joke, allowed you to become a co-conspirator in his priceless reaction-shots, enabled you to experience a sense of timing and style and class that hasn't been seen since, and will never be seen again.
About ten years ago, Johnny Carson did a brief appearance on David Letterman's Late Show, and the effect was about the same. I know because I found a tape of that show when I was back home a little while ago, taped ten years ago when Dave did a week of shows in Los Angeles. I can't remember who the guests were, but every night for a week Dave would say 'Presenting tonight's Top Ten List, Mr.Magic Johnson!', and out would walk that pudgy wunderkind Larry 'Bud' Melman. The gag was still funny the third or fourth time; Dave would announce a famous name, and instead the audience would get Melman. The final night, Dave announced that Johnny Carson would be reading the list, and this time, lo and behold, Carson walked out. (This was two or three years after his run on The Tonight Show had ended.)
The applause was miraculous. It went on and on and on. At one point Carson sat behind the desk, looked as if he was about to say something, then smiled and shook his head and shook Letterman's hand and exited stage left as the audience screamed.
For me, Carson represented grown-up land. If you were old enough to actually be able to watch The Tonight Show on a regular basis, then you were an adult. You had all the rights that that implied. (Which, to a seven year old, basically meant, um, unlimited supplies of cookies and ginger ale and Johnny Carson before bed.) On those rare occasions and Friday nights when I did catch Carson, the jokes always went over my head, but I remember that he was always polite, and the audience always laughed. (It's hard to believe, but back then you never actually saw the audience. Remember that? Carson stood in front of the curtain, and he told his jokes, and you heard laughter, yes, but it seemed to emanate from some other, nearby realm. It kind of freaked me out a bit, actually, but I knew that they were there, those adults, and that was what mattered; I knew that somebody I'd be there, too. I knew that someday, maybe not soon, no, but someday, I'd be able to catch those jokes, and be part of that unseen fan club.)
And I did. By the time I was a teenager, Carson was still on the air, withstanding the assault of Arsenio. There was an old-fashionedness about Johnny that was slowly disappearing in the culture at that point in time. There was a class and a dignity to his humor, somehow. It invited you in on the joke, allowed you to become a co-conspirator in his priceless reaction-shots, enabled you to experience a sense of timing and style and class that hasn't been seen since, and will never be seen again.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
MONKS ARE PEOPLE TOO
If you are a young and able male in modern day Cambodia, there is the very real possibility that you will become a monk-- if not forever, till death do you part, at least for a few years.
Why?
Monks are respected here. People listen to them, seek advice from them, and, on a daily basis, provide money for them. As HIV/AIDS remains a huge problem here, the monks have been enlisted by various groups to provide accurate information in the small towns and villages that line the countryside.
In Phnom Penh, too, monks are a daily sight, walking the streets with their orange robes, clutching umbrellas to shield themselves from the unforgiving heat. Often, books are tucked under their arms: schoolbooks, textbooks, copies of MAD magazine. (Okay, maybe they don't read MAD.)
Some of the best students I ever taught were monks. They are interested in learning. They are interested in acquiring truth. They are interested in concepts like democracy and justice and suffering. They shave their heads and live together in pagodas and instantly, almost miraculously, you could say, become respected citizens of their country, the pride of their families. They become elevated. This makes for a good scholar.
But what is it that the t-shirts they sell at Canada's Wonderland say: Monks are people too? (Okay, maybe there are no t-shirts that actually say that, let alone ones sold at Toronto's coolest theme park, but there should be, damnit...)
One day last year I sat in the computer lab of my old university. Next to me was a young monk, perhaps nineteen years old. I glanced over at his computer seen. He was busily filling out the registration form of match.com, a dating site.
I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that on-line matchmaking services are not part of most Cambodian monks enlightenment process. Call me crazy.
In fact, monks aren't even supposed to be near females. A female student in one of my classes came late into class one afternoon and slipped into a seat beside a monk. He promptly closed his books, stood up, and found a seat at the back of the room. (Did she not know this rule?)
Still, monks are people, too. Another of my students, probably twenty-one, twenty-two years old, seemed to embody the word 'monk' to me. He was polite and solemn and eager to address issues of religion and morality, about the meaning of Christianity, and how its principles shared and overlapped with those of Khmer buddhism. And then one day he came to class in a white dress shirt and black slacks, a shy grin on his face. His time as a monk was done. He came up to me in the cafeteria later that day and let me know that he was interested in his fellow female classmate, romantically interested, and he did he have any tips I could offer? Out the came the pen and the paper.
Each culture's young people head off into the world looking for the same fundamental things: a place to belong, a job that fulfills, a (somewhat) eternal truth that can found, nurtured, sustained. In Cambodia, an ancient land of simple needs, these truths are attained through moderation: You eat two meals a day, and you study Khmer texts, and you shave your head and slap on some orange and purple robes, and you wander the city, and you think about suffering, and you maintain respect for the poor.
Not every young person here becomes a monk, no, but it still seems to me that they're somehow on a kind of track that is nowhere near parallel to ones that run back home. Do the Internet chatrooms and racing video games and action flick DVDs lead teenagers to think about issues of enlightenment? Is shaving your head and studying ancient texts a better way to prepare you for the real world?
I dunno. It's culturally relative, I suppose.
But I've gotten used to the sights of the young monks as they stroll around Phnom Penh, with their gentle smiles and slow, shambling gait. They somehow seem, I don't know, like they consider things more than young people in other, more modern lands. It always feels like they're on to something, that they've figured out primal, fundamental things that I hadn't even contemplated, let alone assessed.
If so, they keep this knowledge to themselves.
Better that way, I think. It's somehow reassuring to view them as mystic, knowing sages, not confused kids groping for answers, as they probably are. Just trying to make their way in the world, tryig to put one foot in front of the other without falling down.
Under the blinding Cambodian sun, they wander the streets. I watch, and wonder.
Why?
Monks are respected here. People listen to them, seek advice from them, and, on a daily basis, provide money for them. As HIV/AIDS remains a huge problem here, the monks have been enlisted by various groups to provide accurate information in the small towns and villages that line the countryside.
In Phnom Penh, too, monks are a daily sight, walking the streets with their orange robes, clutching umbrellas to shield themselves from the unforgiving heat. Often, books are tucked under their arms: schoolbooks, textbooks, copies of MAD magazine. (Okay, maybe they don't read MAD.)
Some of the best students I ever taught were monks. They are interested in learning. They are interested in acquiring truth. They are interested in concepts like democracy and justice and suffering. They shave their heads and live together in pagodas and instantly, almost miraculously, you could say, become respected citizens of their country, the pride of their families. They become elevated. This makes for a good scholar.
But what is it that the t-shirts they sell at Canada's Wonderland say: Monks are people too? (Okay, maybe there are no t-shirts that actually say that, let alone ones sold at Toronto's coolest theme park, but there should be, damnit...)
One day last year I sat in the computer lab of my old university. Next to me was a young monk, perhaps nineteen years old. I glanced over at his computer seen. He was busily filling out the registration form of match.com, a dating site.
I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that on-line matchmaking services are not part of most Cambodian monks enlightenment process. Call me crazy.
In fact, monks aren't even supposed to be near females. A female student in one of my classes came late into class one afternoon and slipped into a seat beside a monk. He promptly closed his books, stood up, and found a seat at the back of the room. (Did she not know this rule?)
Still, monks are people, too. Another of my students, probably twenty-one, twenty-two years old, seemed to embody the word 'monk' to me. He was polite and solemn and eager to address issues of religion and morality, about the meaning of Christianity, and how its principles shared and overlapped with those of Khmer buddhism. And then one day he came to class in a white dress shirt and black slacks, a shy grin on his face. His time as a monk was done. He came up to me in the cafeteria later that day and let me know that he was interested in his fellow female classmate, romantically interested, and he did he have any tips I could offer? Out the came the pen and the paper.
Each culture's young people head off into the world looking for the same fundamental things: a place to belong, a job that fulfills, a (somewhat) eternal truth that can found, nurtured, sustained. In Cambodia, an ancient land of simple needs, these truths are attained through moderation: You eat two meals a day, and you study Khmer texts, and you shave your head and slap on some orange and purple robes, and you wander the city, and you think about suffering, and you maintain respect for the poor.
Not every young person here becomes a monk, no, but it still seems to me that they're somehow on a kind of track that is nowhere near parallel to ones that run back home. Do the Internet chatrooms and racing video games and action flick DVDs lead teenagers to think about issues of enlightenment? Is shaving your head and studying ancient texts a better way to prepare you for the real world?
I dunno. It's culturally relative, I suppose.
But I've gotten used to the sights of the young monks as they stroll around Phnom Penh, with their gentle smiles and slow, shambling gait. They somehow seem, I don't know, like they consider things more than young people in other, more modern lands. It always feels like they're on to something, that they've figured out primal, fundamental things that I hadn't even contemplated, let alone assessed.
If so, they keep this knowledge to themselves.
Better that way, I think. It's somehow reassuring to view them as mystic, knowing sages, not confused kids groping for answers, as they probably are. Just trying to make their way in the world, tryig to put one foot in front of the other without falling down.
Under the blinding Cambodian sun, they wander the streets. I watch, and wonder.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
A GIRL NAMED 'VICTORY'
Sitting on the table beside the computer monitor here at the Galaxy Web internet cafe in lovely, scenic Phnom Penh, Cambodia, are two things, a book and a newspaper: the book being the first volume of AlexsandrI.Solzhenitsyns' Gulag Archipelago, the newspaper being the weekend edition of The Cambodia Daily, whose cover features a story promising details on the one-year anniversary of Chea Vichea, a union leader assassinated a year ago for doing what a lot of union leaders do here, which is cause some trouble and make some noise.
Solzhenitsyn is the Soviet dissident who chronicled life in the Russian version of the concentration camps, the Gulags. I just started the book, but, to my relief, it's very readable and very involving; the translator did a good job of capturing, in straightforward, energetic English, the tone of Sozhenitsyn's original. (I'm assuming he did, anyways, because I don't speak Russian. Or read it. Or write it. But I have seen Rocky IV man, many times, and that flick features a Russian villian, so that's got to give me some brownie points, doesn't it?)
Two, three, four years ago I wouldn 't have thought of picking up either this book or this newspaper. The stories wouldn't have interested me. The concepts and ideaologies would have been over my head. (A lot of them still are, yes, thanks for pointing that out, but I'll choose to blame it on the Ontario education system, rather than my own thick skull.)
When you live in a foreign country, if you keep your eyes open, and you look around a little bit, you're presented with views of the world that rarely, if ever, mesh with the portrait of life that was painted for you while growing up back home. This can be dislocating, at first; you either examine the different ways that the strange-and-alien-world you're presently wandering through has chosen to express itself, or you put the tinted sunglasses back over your eyes and click back on the National Geographic channel, content to observe the world's oddities, landscapes and strange, backward cultures in between advertisements for hairspray and chewing gum. Just the other night I saw the most bizarre thing, this Discovery channel documentary show where Julia Roberts hung out in the middle of Mongolia for a little while, chilling with the local Mongols, marvelling at the size of the moon and how it loomed over the vast, endless plains.
There's nothing wrong with that view of the world, because guess what? Our globe is a marvellous, bizarre place filled with beautiful landscapes and oddly shaped people, both physically and mentally. It's nice to look at it and ponder it and see how it matches our take on things, how it compares to the streets and blocks that we call home.
But when you're in it, you're forced to look at things. You're forced to interact with people. You're obligated to understand the larger forces that are shaping and directing the little girl with no shoes and dirty cheeks who you buy your newspaper from.
When I taught at a university here, the students ranged in age from fifteen to fifty. I had a fifteen year old student who was super bright, a beaming young girl who always did her homework and once, good-naturedly (I hope), called me a liar because I had said I would give back an assignment the week before and I hadn't yet. (Being honest in this dishonest culture was a big thing for her; she could spot a fib a mile away.) The first time I met this outspoken youth, I read the names of the students in the class, and I stumbled over her name.
"How do you pronounce this?" I asked.
"It's 'Victory," she said.
"Like the English word?"
"It is the English word," she said. "My parents wanted me to succeed in life."
How old would her parents be? Thirty-five, forty, maybe fifty. They would have been young people during the Khmer Rouge era. They would have seen family members killed, or maybe they lived in the Thai border camps for years on end, wondering when their fair share of life's bounty would be made available to them.
I also taught a North Korean kid, whose father owns the North Korean restaurant in town. This kid grew up in Burkina Faso, Africa (one of the worst places to live on the planet), where his proud papa taught Tae Kwan Do to the communist leaders of that corrupt regime. Somebody just told me that he was taking pictures of his classmates last week because a return to good old North Korea was on the table in the next few days. Back to Pyongyang to fulfill his military duties, I'm assuming. Mama mia.
This is all heady stuff for a boy from St.Catharines. Issues of war and peace and genocidal regimes and pudgy dictators with super-freaky hair are personified, presto-changeo, right before my eyes. I'm in the thick of it, with the ever-present option of leaving, while everyone else has to stay. That's the difference, and a grand difference it is.
I imagine most Canadian kids are apolitical. They don't have reasons to be engaged with the forces of good and evil that are everyday occurrences elsewhere around the planet. With immigrants from places like Somalia and Sudan arriving daily in Canada, though, that white-bread, idyllic Canadian world, while still a reality in most parts of the country, will change. Kids will learn about their classmates previous lives. They will listen to stories of torture, and wonder why this has to be. The world will close in on Canada, little by little.
I hope.
This way, young people can at least be aware of what it means to be Canadian. It is not about a flag or a puck or natural beauty. It is about what we have that everyone wants.
You won't find too many kids named 'Victory' in Canada. We haven't felt the need to give our children a name that will inspire them to relentlessly remember the goal of liberation, personal and national, that you must always strive for, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds that threaten to grind you down, day by day.
No, not many kids have to be named 'Victory' back home.
I don't know whether this is something to celebrate or worry about.
Solzhenitsyn is the Soviet dissident who chronicled life in the Russian version of the concentration camps, the Gulags. I just started the book, but, to my relief, it's very readable and very involving; the translator did a good job of capturing, in straightforward, energetic English, the tone of Sozhenitsyn's original. (I'm assuming he did, anyways, because I don't speak Russian. Or read it. Or write it. But I have seen Rocky IV man, many times, and that flick features a Russian villian, so that's got to give me some brownie points, doesn't it?)
Two, three, four years ago I wouldn 't have thought of picking up either this book or this newspaper. The stories wouldn't have interested me. The concepts and ideaologies would have been over my head. (A lot of them still are, yes, thanks for pointing that out, but I'll choose to blame it on the Ontario education system, rather than my own thick skull.)
When you live in a foreign country, if you keep your eyes open, and you look around a little bit, you're presented with views of the world that rarely, if ever, mesh with the portrait of life that was painted for you while growing up back home. This can be dislocating, at first; you either examine the different ways that the strange-and-alien-world you're presently wandering through has chosen to express itself, or you put the tinted sunglasses back over your eyes and click back on the National Geographic channel, content to observe the world's oddities, landscapes and strange, backward cultures in between advertisements for hairspray and chewing gum. Just the other night I saw the most bizarre thing, this Discovery channel documentary show where Julia Roberts hung out in the middle of Mongolia for a little while, chilling with the local Mongols, marvelling at the size of the moon and how it loomed over the vast, endless plains.
There's nothing wrong with that view of the world, because guess what? Our globe is a marvellous, bizarre place filled with beautiful landscapes and oddly shaped people, both physically and mentally. It's nice to look at it and ponder it and see how it matches our take on things, how it compares to the streets and blocks that we call home.
But when you're in it, you're forced to look at things. You're forced to interact with people. You're obligated to understand the larger forces that are shaping and directing the little girl with no shoes and dirty cheeks who you buy your newspaper from.
When I taught at a university here, the students ranged in age from fifteen to fifty. I had a fifteen year old student who was super bright, a beaming young girl who always did her homework and once, good-naturedly (I hope), called me a liar because I had said I would give back an assignment the week before and I hadn't yet. (Being honest in this dishonest culture was a big thing for her; she could spot a fib a mile away.) The first time I met this outspoken youth, I read the names of the students in the class, and I stumbled over her name.
"How do you pronounce this?" I asked.
"It's 'Victory," she said.
"Like the English word?"
"It is the English word," she said. "My parents wanted me to succeed in life."
How old would her parents be? Thirty-five, forty, maybe fifty. They would have been young people during the Khmer Rouge era. They would have seen family members killed, or maybe they lived in the Thai border camps for years on end, wondering when their fair share of life's bounty would be made available to them.
I also taught a North Korean kid, whose father owns the North Korean restaurant in town. This kid grew up in Burkina Faso, Africa (one of the worst places to live on the planet), where his proud papa taught Tae Kwan Do to the communist leaders of that corrupt regime. Somebody just told me that he was taking pictures of his classmates last week because a return to good old North Korea was on the table in the next few days. Back to Pyongyang to fulfill his military duties, I'm assuming. Mama mia.
This is all heady stuff for a boy from St.Catharines. Issues of war and peace and genocidal regimes and pudgy dictators with super-freaky hair are personified, presto-changeo, right before my eyes. I'm in the thick of it, with the ever-present option of leaving, while everyone else has to stay. That's the difference, and a grand difference it is.
I imagine most Canadian kids are apolitical. They don't have reasons to be engaged with the forces of good and evil that are everyday occurrences elsewhere around the planet. With immigrants from places like Somalia and Sudan arriving daily in Canada, though, that white-bread, idyllic Canadian world, while still a reality in most parts of the country, will change. Kids will learn about their classmates previous lives. They will listen to stories of torture, and wonder why this has to be. The world will close in on Canada, little by little.
I hope.
This way, young people can at least be aware of what it means to be Canadian. It is not about a flag or a puck or natural beauty. It is about what we have that everyone wants.
You won't find too many kids named 'Victory' in Canada. We haven't felt the need to give our children a name that will inspire them to relentlessly remember the goal of liberation, personal and national, that you must always strive for, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds that threaten to grind you down, day by day.
No, not many kids have to be named 'Victory' back home.
I don't know whether this is something to celebrate or worry about.
TODAY'S FORECAST...
You sit down at twenty-five and stand up at sixty-five.
- Orson Welles on California
What was he talking about? He was talking about the weather, because it's always, eternally nice and sunny and oh so clear in the Land of Schwarzenegger. Blue skies, no clouds, t-shirt weather, shorts weather. Every day of the year.
The same is true of Cambodia. It is always, always, always hot, except when it's cool, which is rare, usually in the mornings, almost always between five and six. Officially, there are two seasons in this country, rainy and dry, each lasting six months. Don't let the classification fool you, though; during the rainy season, it it still bloody boiling -- it just means that on top of the ridiculous tropical heat, you are treated to ceaseless, relentless streams of water for an hour or two in the late afternoon. Right now, as I write, at this very moment, the dry season is, I think, coming to a close, no rain having touched Phnom Penh's streets in, God, I can't remember how long.
I wrote that I think the dry season is ending because it's hard to differentiate between the days and weeks and months here. It's bloody surreal. Back home (or even in Japan), there is rain and sleet and slow and windy days and cool days and brisk days and days when you have to wear a hat or a toque and days where you need a light coat and you have to check the weather reports before leaving the house, or, at the very least, you might want to stick your head out the window and test how things are, just to see which way the wind is blowing.
None of that stuff here.
Just put on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and you're good for the year. Good for your life.
A good thing and bad thing, I guess. I don't miss the Canadian winters much (or even the Japanese ones), but the seasons that we grow up with shape the barometer by which we measure the passage of time. Without those seasons, there's the danger of existing in this steady, monotonous limbo of life, where one day blends into the next, and the next, and the next, and time's passage begins to seem illusory and unimportant, today being all that matters.
Depending on how you look at it, that might not be a bad thing after all.
- Orson Welles on California
What was he talking about? He was talking about the weather, because it's always, eternally nice and sunny and oh so clear in the Land of Schwarzenegger. Blue skies, no clouds, t-shirt weather, shorts weather. Every day of the year.
The same is true of Cambodia. It is always, always, always hot, except when it's cool, which is rare, usually in the mornings, almost always between five and six. Officially, there are two seasons in this country, rainy and dry, each lasting six months. Don't let the classification fool you, though; during the rainy season, it it still bloody boiling -- it just means that on top of the ridiculous tropical heat, you are treated to ceaseless, relentless streams of water for an hour or two in the late afternoon. Right now, as I write, at this very moment, the dry season is, I think, coming to a close, no rain having touched Phnom Penh's streets in, God, I can't remember how long.
I wrote that I think the dry season is ending because it's hard to differentiate between the days and weeks and months here. It's bloody surreal. Back home (or even in Japan), there is rain and sleet and slow and windy days and cool days and brisk days and days when you have to wear a hat or a toque and days where you need a light coat and you have to check the weather reports before leaving the house, or, at the very least, you might want to stick your head out the window and test how things are, just to see which way the wind is blowing.
None of that stuff here.
Just put on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and you're good for the year. Good for your life.
A good thing and bad thing, I guess. I don't miss the Canadian winters much (or even the Japanese ones), but the seasons that we grow up with shape the barometer by which we measure the passage of time. Without those seasons, there's the danger of existing in this steady, monotonous limbo of life, where one day blends into the next, and the next, and the next, and time's passage begins to seem illusory and unimportant, today being all that matters.
Depending on how you look at it, that might not be a bad thing after all.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
A GOOD SIGN: CAMBODIAN STUDENTS, CONDOLEEZA RICE, THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, AND BARBARA BUSH'S THANKSGIVING STUFFING
Walking home from work yesterday, I passed by just one of the many colleges, institutes, academic centres of learning, call-them-what-you-will, that populate Phnom Penh. Along with the backpackers, mosquitoes, English teachers and moto drivers, 'higher learning' places are now a common sight. Standing outside in her white shirt and blue skirt was a young girl waiting for her ride, holding her jet-black books and binders tightly to her chest.
That's quite a sight, in and of itself. Only fifteen years ago, I don't think too many girls in Phnom Penh were studying much of anything. I wondered: Exactly what was she studying? Where did she want to go in life? Was there even a chance in hell of her getting there, given the modern realities of Cambodia's political and social structures?
The personal and the political are always linked in my mind.
For the past two days, Condoleeza Rice has been grilled for hours on end in her Secretary of State confirmation hearings. Forty years ago, Ms.Rice would have been similar in status and possibility to that Khmer girl I saw. The America of 1964, the Alabama of 1964, did not hold much hope for a young black girl. Rice went to the same school as one of the girls killed in the infamous church bombings in Montgomery Alabama (a story chronicled in Spike Lee's documentary 4 Little Girls). At that time, Rice wouldn't have been able to grab a hamburger at Woolworth's if she wanted to. "Ah, but you can become president someday," her parents told her, and she believed them.
And so she might. (It's not as far fetched as it may sound.) First up, she has to succeed as Secretary of State. Second up, she has to link America's policies with the world's expectations. What a shining moment of pride and possibility for African-Americans.
Yet, she is doing this as part of an administration that is disliked, if not despised, by most black Americans (and a hell of a lot of other whites, Hispanics, Chinese, Mongolians...) What should be a crowning moment of pride for the 'Civil Rights generation' hasn't really felt like that at all. Everybody's pleased as punch that Condi's made it so far, and it certainly represents a magnificent achievement...but did it have to be for somebody like Bush, they wonder. Did it have to be an African-American woman who was largely responsible for the war in Iraq, they ask.
What's Rice thinking, in these final few days before she takes the reins from Colin Powell? Somewhere inside of her, beneath the overachieving Soviet expert and former Stanford provost, beats the heart of that little girl who came of age in a slowly desegregating America. A little girl who had be twice as better as the whites around her if she wanted to succeed. A little girl who has made it to the top of the top, only to find that most of her own people may respect her, yes, but not her agenda, or her boss, or what he stands for.
Her boss, too: What does he think?
I'm not talking about Bush the president. I'm talking about Bush the frat boy, Bush the practical joker, the eldest son of the family who kind of bumbled through his twenties and thirties looking for something to focus his energies on. I just read a book about the 'Bush family dynasty'; its central argument being that the Bush family has been at the centre of an almost century long vortex that lies at the heart of the military-industrial complex, that nebulous alliance of big business, big industry and big military that has fueled America's imperialist ambitions. Money, oil, the CIA, oil, Saudi Arabia, oil, the CIA, Texas money, oil -- Bush the elder, Bush the younger, and their family connections to the whole damn shebang, are all chronicled in exhaustive detail. (Oh, and did I mention their links to the oil industry?Or the CIA? Very scary stuff.)
The point is, at one point, Bush was a high school kid who liked to screw around and play baseball and try to cop a feel every now and then. While his dad was forging the international links that would eventually sustain his son's political career, Bush was daydreaming through Economics 101, waiting for the bell, watching the clock. He was a yahoo, in other words, as we all were, and as some of us still are (present company absolutely included.)
This kind of stuff fascinates me. Slowly, through the days and years that claim us all, somehow, Bush was brought into the family circle. He learned the ropes. The intricacies and complexities of global cartels and local, West Texas oil tycoons gradually became understanable, if not clear, resulting in a worldwide order and destiny that has been, without exaggeration, largely shaped and refined by a single family, by a father and his son.
It's fascinating, if you look at it this way. All of these complex, global-altering concepts of finance and theology and espionage and shady deals made in brightly lit rooms and shadowy hallways, and it all comes down (as all of our lives do) to a Thanksgiving dinner in Kennebunkport, and George Dubya walking into a room, and hugging his dad, and his dad asking how things are, and the son saying pretty good, pretty good, can't complain, and how's that turkey coming? The stuffing going to be like last year's? That was good stuff.
The personal and the political, linked, inseparate.
So back to the young Khmer girl. Let's not forget about her, shall we? She stands in front of the school, waiting for her ride. She's learning English, maybe computers, possibly a little accounting. Corruption and politics and money changing hands goes on all around her. A few blocks away, political parties and treaties and deaths are being planned. She's oblivious to it all, as she should be, as Rice and Bush before her were, as you were, too (and maybe still are).
Who knows? She could be a future leader in this country, twenty, thirty years from now. Stranger things have happened. Or she could be a housewife by the time she's twenty, a more likely scenario. (Ah, but this is Cambodia, and since when could the word 'likely' be applied to anything with certainty? So let's allow her her dreams; let's give her that much, at the very least.)
All around the country, big changes are happening, ideas are being discussed, senators are being bribed, coups being planned.
And it all comes back that girl, waiting for her ride. It all comes back to the ordinary lives we try to lead in the middle of swirling, indefinable political tornadoes that shake us up and lift us high.
As I walked down the street, I looked back to see if she was still standing there.
She was.
For some reason, I took that as a good sign.
That's quite a sight, in and of itself. Only fifteen years ago, I don't think too many girls in Phnom Penh were studying much of anything. I wondered: Exactly what was she studying? Where did she want to go in life? Was there even a chance in hell of her getting there, given the modern realities of Cambodia's political and social structures?
The personal and the political are always linked in my mind.
For the past two days, Condoleeza Rice has been grilled for hours on end in her Secretary of State confirmation hearings. Forty years ago, Ms.Rice would have been similar in status and possibility to that Khmer girl I saw. The America of 1964, the Alabama of 1964, did not hold much hope for a young black girl. Rice went to the same school as one of the girls killed in the infamous church bombings in Montgomery Alabama (a story chronicled in Spike Lee's documentary 4 Little Girls). At that time, Rice wouldn't have been able to grab a hamburger at Woolworth's if she wanted to. "Ah, but you can become president someday," her parents told her, and she believed them.
And so she might. (It's not as far fetched as it may sound.) First up, she has to succeed as Secretary of State. Second up, she has to link America's policies with the world's expectations. What a shining moment of pride and possibility for African-Americans.
Yet, she is doing this as part of an administration that is disliked, if not despised, by most black Americans (and a hell of a lot of other whites, Hispanics, Chinese, Mongolians...) What should be a crowning moment of pride for the 'Civil Rights generation' hasn't really felt like that at all. Everybody's pleased as punch that Condi's made it so far, and it certainly represents a magnificent achievement...but did it have to be for somebody like Bush, they wonder. Did it have to be an African-American woman who was largely responsible for the war in Iraq, they ask.
What's Rice thinking, in these final few days before she takes the reins from Colin Powell? Somewhere inside of her, beneath the overachieving Soviet expert and former Stanford provost, beats the heart of that little girl who came of age in a slowly desegregating America. A little girl who had be twice as better as the whites around her if she wanted to succeed. A little girl who has made it to the top of the top, only to find that most of her own people may respect her, yes, but not her agenda, or her boss, or what he stands for.
Her boss, too: What does he think?
I'm not talking about Bush the president. I'm talking about Bush the frat boy, Bush the practical joker, the eldest son of the family who kind of bumbled through his twenties and thirties looking for something to focus his energies on. I just read a book about the 'Bush family dynasty'; its central argument being that the Bush family has been at the centre of an almost century long vortex that lies at the heart of the military-industrial complex, that nebulous alliance of big business, big industry and big military that has fueled America's imperialist ambitions. Money, oil, the CIA, oil, Saudi Arabia, oil, the CIA, Texas money, oil -- Bush the elder, Bush the younger, and their family connections to the whole damn shebang, are all chronicled in exhaustive detail. (Oh, and did I mention their links to the oil industry?Or the CIA? Very scary stuff.)
The point is, at one point, Bush was a high school kid who liked to screw around and play baseball and try to cop a feel every now and then. While his dad was forging the international links that would eventually sustain his son's political career, Bush was daydreaming through Economics 101, waiting for the bell, watching the clock. He was a yahoo, in other words, as we all were, and as some of us still are (present company absolutely included.)
This kind of stuff fascinates me. Slowly, through the days and years that claim us all, somehow, Bush was brought into the family circle. He learned the ropes. The intricacies and complexities of global cartels and local, West Texas oil tycoons gradually became understanable, if not clear, resulting in a worldwide order and destiny that has been, without exaggeration, largely shaped and refined by a single family, by a father and his son.
It's fascinating, if you look at it this way. All of these complex, global-altering concepts of finance and theology and espionage and shady deals made in brightly lit rooms and shadowy hallways, and it all comes down (as all of our lives do) to a Thanksgiving dinner in Kennebunkport, and George Dubya walking into a room, and hugging his dad, and his dad asking how things are, and the son saying pretty good, pretty good, can't complain, and how's that turkey coming? The stuffing going to be like last year's? That was good stuff.
The personal and the political, linked, inseparate.
So back to the young Khmer girl. Let's not forget about her, shall we? She stands in front of the school, waiting for her ride. She's learning English, maybe computers, possibly a little accounting. Corruption and politics and money changing hands goes on all around her. A few blocks away, political parties and treaties and deaths are being planned. She's oblivious to it all, as she should be, as Rice and Bush before her were, as you were, too (and maybe still are).
Who knows? She could be a future leader in this country, twenty, thirty years from now. Stranger things have happened. Or she could be a housewife by the time she's twenty, a more likely scenario. (Ah, but this is Cambodia, and since when could the word 'likely' be applied to anything with certainty? So let's allow her her dreams; let's give her that much, at the very least.)
All around the country, big changes are happening, ideas are being discussed, senators are being bribed, coups being planned.
And it all comes back that girl, waiting for her ride. It all comes back to the ordinary lives we try to lead in the middle of swirling, indefinable political tornadoes that shake us up and lift us high.
As I walked down the street, I looked back to see if she was still standing there.
She was.
For some reason, I took that as a good sign.
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